Madison Avenue's strategy for popularizing computers shifted from the 1950s through the 1980s. At first pitches focused on reliability and speed, but by the 1960s, advertising brochures put big systems in gardens next to fashion models. When PCs came on the market, the sales pitch changed again. Computing went family friendly, with endorsements from Bill Cosby, William Shatner, and even Charlie Chaplin. Welcome to the Computer History Museum's "Selling the Computer Revolution" exhibit.

In 1983, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy summarized his mission as follows: "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip'."

This Hellenic manifesto certainly gets to the point. Unfortunately, Ogilvy's battle cry offers little guidance for helping us view advertising spots from a half century ago—the kind that fans of the AMC series Mad Men see being worked out alongside the personal lives of Don Draper, Peggy Olson, and Pete Campbell. The dictum offers even less aid for considering ads that hawk items so outmoded that even Ogilvy's skills could not inspire us to march on our local electronics store.

Take, for example, sales literature for mainframe computers made and marketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Even after reading a classy three color foldout for a room filling UNIVAC or PDP-5, would you buy one today? No way unless you are a dedicated collector. But now, thanks to the Computer History Museum's wonderful exhibit titled Selling the Computer Revolution, we can appreciate the considerable creative effort that went into making these machines attractive to business owners and consumers.

The public framing of computers shifted from the 1950s through the 1970s, the exhibit notes. In that first decade, advertisement and brochure makers focused their attention on engineers.

"Speed, efficiency, economy, and reliability," were the standard buzzwords. But as computers got smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, ads encouraged consumers to see them as more than just calculating machines. Pamphlets foregrounded the growing female labor force that ran them first as key punch operators and programmer assistants, then as programmers and computer buyers themselves. These advertisements also took on an increasingly futuristic and almost utopian edge.

"It was to have been the Nuclear Age," declared one 1976 ad for IBM. "It became the Computer Age."

Let's follow the computer marketing trail, and watch how the message evolved.

Well endowed

Mainframe computers in the 1950s like J. Presper Eckert's UNIVAC were big and expensive. They required entire rooms and in some instances building floors for their proper maintenance. And so computer literature emphasized maximum processing bang for the corporate buck. The RCA 501, for example, "has been endowed with the work habits that result in low work unit cost-speed, economy of motion, accuracy," the machine's 1958 sales brochure explained, "and with the capability of applying these efficient work methods to the full scope of business routines."

Brochure pictures of the mainframe turned the unwieldiness of the system to its advantage. "Directed to executives with a flair for facts," boasted an image caption, which depicted a suited man easily running the whole fifteen panel RCA 501 shebang from a single console.

"WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM?" asked the UNIVAC brochure. "Is it the tedious record-keeping and the arduous figure-work of commerce and industry? Or is it the intricate mathematics of science? Perhaps your problem is now considered impossible because of prohibitive costs associated with conventional methods of solution."

No worries, advertisers assured readers. They tackled anxiety about programming costs by summarizing prospective budgets in concise, easy to remember figures. "How much computer can you buy for less than $1000/MONTH?" asked the opening page of a 1955 brochure for the Bendix G-15 computing system. The large type answer was "PLENTY," followed by a photo of a crew assembling the operation in somebody's office.

Of course, as the buyer read on, he or she discovered a few extra details about the Bendix. It cost about $1,030 a month to lease an alphanumeric system. The sales price went "as low as $14,900." But to give the reader an idea of how concerned clients were about computing power, consider the details this brochure offered about processing times.

I lived through the computer revolutionin the late 1960s our AR went from hand written ledger cards to a Boroughs book keeping machine.it still used ledger cards but had a disk drive and summarized the sessions activity.programs loaded with a [TTY] punched tape..12 years later we had an IBM-38[replaced by a 386 and Unix] I write this on an i7

my mother 1910-2007 regularly rode in her fathers carriageher mothers electric coupe [with a steering tiller]drove a variety of cars herself made the transition from rail to propeller to jet in commercial traveland flew SS in the concord

looking back each generation has its amazing changesI see 3 yo kids playing games on mom I-phonecomputers will be as much a commodity to them as air travel is to usand what ever the next thing.....it will be theirs

Neat article! I remember the ads for the PCjr and that very ad for the Osborne 1 in the 80s.

Of course, the reason I remember seeing those ads in the 80s is because THOSE COMPUTERS CAME OUT IN THE 80s. It seems kind of silly to start a section about ads in the 70s off with a bit about an ad that came out in 80s. ;P

I remember reading my parents' copies of BYTE magazine back then, though. I do miss the way the articles were structured, and even the zany ads.

Back in the day, it was IBM vs. the BUNCH. I'll leave it to interested readers to explore who the BUNCH was.

I worked for Burroughs (hint) in the late 70's, and purchased an Apple II from a co-worker who didn't get it. That was the beginning of the end of the mainframe era, and Microsoft eventually replaced IBM as the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

For those who don't believe we are entering the post-PC era, I suggest you look back in history. It has a tendency to repeat itself. I just hope that we don't end up with another 800 pound gorilla. The Wintel dynasty is over. The focus of software development is on the cloud and mobile devices.

What an amazing story! Great work and a fun read. If you want to read more about the early years (for young folks like me who think the Apple IIe was a great computer to have at school... in first grade!), there is a book called "Soul of the New Machine." It really gets into the people behind the industry, and is a great read, kind of like this (but focused on engineers and early pioneers, but not the more typical ones).

Seeing the advert for the Burroughs 2500 and 3500 brought back a memory. My father used to work for Burroughs as a support manager.

Back in the 1970s he was upgrading a user site from a B2500 to a B3500. Burroughs trucked in new system boxes a couple of days before the planned upgrade. On the weekend of the upgrade the customer's data center was shut down and only Burroughs people were there to "upgrade" the system, which actually amounted to modifying some jumpers to increase the system clock speeds and changing the logo on the outside of the system. The next week they trucked out the same system boxes they had brought in.

Total cost to the customer: $75,000. That was in 1970s dollars - at least double that in current money.

The picture of the Stantec Zebra ( 1st machine pic through the (Selling...) link). I actually touched one of these, still working, in 1968. If you look carefully at the pictures you'll see a telephone dial. Dial in a drum address. wait until the green light came of to show there was synchronization. Dial in the new contents of that address, wait until the second light came on to show it had been written to the drum and verified. Gurus of this machine prided themselves on positioning instructions around the drum to minimize latency and therefore make programs run faster. Example. After doing a multiply you'd need about 1 1/2 drum revolutions before the cpu was ready to do another instruction so you'd position the next instruction just a bit farther than 1/2 the circumference of the drum away.

I was not one of the masters of the machine allowed to program this thing...I was working on PDP-8 and DDP-116 machines at the time doing message switching and PCM telephone switching at STC.

The first ads were pretty technical since they were aimed at engineers who were often in the R&D department. There were a lot of computers to choose from with various architectures and performance abilities. There were no well defined categories, so the ad had to say something about price and performance, especially with an audience of engineers.

By the 1960s computers were important corporate assets necessary for accounting and planning, so they were being sold to executives who cared less about the technical stuff, but more about what they could do for the company and the company's image. Companies would often have a fancy glass "fishbowl" to show off their data processing center, so the computer had to look good and look modern, even futuristic.

You can read, and many have read, a fair bit into these ads regarding our attitudes towards class and sex. Engineers were working class; executives were business class, and it showed in the ads. Women were largely decorative, but you can pick up some changes in the 70s and more so in the 80s. (You actually would find some non-white people in the late 70s ads, but they were awfully rare.)

----

IBM used class very effectively in maintaining their monopoly. Buying IBM was like serving Chivas Regal. No one would complain. IBM set itself up as a corporation's corporation, something your corporation should aspire to. It wasn't just the computers. They had an art museum in the Manhattan offices. They hired the Eames team to do their corporate exhibits. Their research centers were commissioned by name brand architects. If Picasso had done computer console design, they would have hired him. (I think he did their manuals or maybe I'm thinking of Borges.) Even the white shirt and tie uniform made a statement back in the day of regimental ties. (Repairmen were advised to carry a spare shirt along with their tools, replacement parts, anti-ground matts and the like.)

----

If anyone is still reading this blather, I'll mention the Honeywell ads from the 60s and early 70s which I always enjoyed. They were animal sculptures made of loose components like resistors and capacitors. They were really clever and I can imagine them going for tens of thousands on eBay or Etsy. You can find some picture at http://www.dvq.com/ads/honeywell_sa_9_66.pdf

Anyhow, with the new site and all, how about some nifty way of showing a bunch of linked images that doesn't take me away from the article page.

We actually have that, you'll notice sometimes the intro image to an article can be enlarged in a lightbox (and then optionally clicked to open in a new window) we're just missing a little code to integrate it into the in-body image insertion of the CMS. It's definitely high on the list to fix!

See this story for an example of what I'm talking about (opening comic image). Those intro images have access to the code already.

Seeing the advert for the Burroughs 2500 and 3500 brought back a memory. My father used to work for Burroughs as a support manager.

Back in the 1970s he was upgrading a user site from a B2500 to a B3500. Burroughs trucked in new system boxes a couple of days before the planned upgrade. On the weekend of the upgrade the customer's data center was shut down and only Burroughs people were there to "upgrade" the system, which actually amounted to modifying some jumpers to increase the system clock speeds and changing the logo on the outside of the system. The next week they trucked out the same system boxes they had brought in.

Total cost to the customer: $75,000. That was in 1970s dollars - at least double that in current money.

What cost $75000 in 1975 would cost $300470.78 in 2010 per the inflation calculator at westegg.com. So more like 4 times that now.

Not to be outdone by Burroughs, in 1969 (the year of the first Apollo moon landing and three years after the first episode of Star Trek) UNIVAC came out with a brochure that gave its 9400 system a distinctly lunar countenance.

I think 2001: A Space Odessey in 1968, the year before this Univac, would be more appropriate reference, considering the stark lunar feeling.

I use to work for Honeywell Information Systems in the 1970s as a hardware engineer in Australia. The computer circuit boards were 12" by 12" and alway cost a minimum of $10,000 per board to replace (to the customer) no matter what the repair. Memory boards were 64k and cost $1000 per K, they were among the first IC memory boards.A group of on site engineers who worked night shift got into trouble for repairing individual boards by buying ICs for a couple of dollars from Tandy (Radio Shack) and replacing faulty chips on site to save time in repairs.Honeywell was upset at the loss of revenue, despite their income from very expensive on site maintance contracts, the engineers were told to stop on site repairs and swap out full computer boards and bill the customer.The Honeywell level 66 mainframes filled two specially designed floors of purpose built computer centers in Sydney and Melbourne they were impressive and huge machines that were a true competitor to IBM.

That guy swinging the Osborne in a carefree manner? With the jacket off you can see that he's actually an olympic weightlifter. Also, large banks of fans had to be used in the studio to keep him sweat-free during the shoot. Ordinary mortals tried to lift the thing, but after three hernias they gave up on that.

Every time I see an old computer I'm amazed how we used them at all. While there are a few classics (like Pac Man) that are arguably best on a classic system like the Atari 400, we have it so good in 2012. How did early IT people ever justify $15k/year (1950s dollars, remember) based on the productivity gains of those dinosaurs?

I didn't see The Three F's - Fragile, Fickle, and Finicky - used, but they are words that even early and eager adopters used, often, throughout virtually all of the eras covered here. (You're right, there was a fourth word, but we won't go there.) Of course, that would be a different history entirely - a collection of horror stories. It really is a wonder that we've come as far as we have.

There is a sense given that these ads used women in a positive way in that they showed them competently using the machines and it's remarked that "as programmers" women were even the target audience. While I'm sure there were a few women in that category, overall, nothing could be further from the truth.

In the early ads, women were just used as stand-ins in a standard way, almost like adding a pretty bow to a package. The later ads where women are using the machines were intended not to show liberated women at work, but to counter concerns over the labour needed to operate the early models.

The buyer, typically a man, had two overarching concerns when it came to these early computers which was justifying the original expense and secondly, the manpower to run the things, (typically four to six people even for a small one). Women, (at the time), were an expendable, unskilled, non-union workforce that could be hired and fired at will and would work for next to nothing.

The pictures showing women running the computers were far from emancipatory. They were telling the audience that these things were "so simple they could be run by women," and thus the owner didn't have to worry about hiring a bunch of "real" engineers to work them at great cost.

How did early IT people ever justify $15k/year (1950s dollars, remember) based on the productivity gains of those dinosaurs?

If you ever watch old movies they occasionally show huge rooms full of accountants & bookkeepers with adding machines.

Switch to rooms full of accountants and bookkeepers passing information to data entry people, and those people punching information into terminals that look suspiciously like adding machines. Just making the point that the productivity gains would have been very hard to show.

How did early IT people ever justify $15k/year (1950s dollars, remember) based on the productivity gains of those dinosaurs?

If you ever watch old movies they occasionally show huge rooms full of accountants & bookkeepers with adding machines.

Switch to rooms full of accountants and bookkeepers passing information to data entry people, and those people punching information into terminals that look suspiciously like adding machines. Just making the point that the productivity gains would have been very hard to show.

Every Fortune 500 was able to justify the expense, so it couldn't have been that hard.

How did early IT people ever justify $15k/year (1950s dollars, remember) based on the productivity gains of those dinosaurs?

If you ever watch old movies they occasionally show huge rooms full of accountants & bookkeepers with adding machines.

Switch to rooms full of accountants and bookkeepers passing information to data entry people, and those people punching information into terminals that look suspiciously like adding machines. Just making the point that the productivity gains would have been very hard to show.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.